Welcome to our collection of quotes by Theodore Parker. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Theodore Parker
Theodore Parker (August 24, 1810 – May 10, 1860) was an American transcendentalist and reforming minister of the Unitarian church. A reformer and abolitionist, his words and popular quotations would later inspire speeches by Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr.
Temperance is corporal piety; it is the preservation of divine order in the body.
The most useful is the greatest.
Democracy means not 'I am as good as you are' but 'You are as good as I am.
There is no college for the conscience.
I ask no risen dust to teach me immortality; I am conscious of eternal life.
Want and wealth equally harden the human heart, as frost and fire are both alien to the human flesh. Famine and gluttony alike drive away nature from the heart of man.
There never was a great truth but it was reverenced; never a great institution, nor a great man, that did not, sooner or later, receive the reverence of mankind.
The lottery of honest labor, drawn by time, is the only one whose prizes are worth taking up and carrying home.
That which is called liberality is frequently nothing more than the vanity of giving.
The use of great men is to serve the little men, to take care of the human race, and act as practical interpreters of justice and truth.
Science, also, is most largely indebted to these beauty-loving Greeks, for truth is one form of loveliness.
The miser, poor fool, not only starves his body, but also his own soul.
Love is the piety of the affections.
Magnificent promises are always to be suspected.
Democracy is direct self-government over all the people, for all the people, by all the people.
Wit has its place in debate; in controversy it is a legitimate weapon, offensive and defensive.
The great basis of the Christian faith is compassion; do not dismiss that from your hearts, neither will your Maker.
The earnestness of life is the only passport to satisfaction of life.
The Roman Christian mythology (and theology) discourages the vice of licentiousness, and so this is better than the heathen, but it encourages bigotry, hypocrisy, cant, and many another vice which the older Mother of Abominations kept clear from.
Intellect is stronger than cannon.
Love of truth will bless the lover all his days; yet when he brings her home, his fair-faced bride, she comes empty-handed to his door, herself her only dower.
Gratitude is a nice touch of beauty added last of all to the countenance. Giving a classic beauty, an angelic loveliness, to the character.
Temperance is corporeal piety; it is the preservation of divine order in the body.
Every rose is an autograph from the hand of the Almighty God on this world about us. He has inscribed His thoughts in these marvelous hieroglyphics which sense and science have been these many thousand years seeking to understand.
There is no intercessor, angel, mediator, between man and God; for man can speak and God hear, each for himself. He requires no advocates to plead for men.
Justice is the idea of God, the ideal of man, the rule of conduct writ in the nature of mankind.
He prays best who, not asking God to do man's work, prays penitence, prays resolutions, and then prays deeds -- thus supplicating with heart and head and hands.
What sad faces one always sees in the asylums for orphans! It is more fatal to neglect the heart than the head.
All the spaces between my mind and the mind of God are full of truths waiting to be crystallized into laws for the government of the masses.
The duty of labor is written on a man's body: in the stout muscle of the arm,, and the delicate machinery of the hand.
Such a large sweet fruit is a complete marriage, that it needs a very long summer to ripen in and then a long winter to mellow and season it.
Yet, if he would, man cannot live all to this world. If not religious, he will be superstitious. IF he worship not the true God, he will have his idols.
I believe in the admission of women to the full rights of citizenship and share in government, on the express grounds that few women keep house so badly or with such wastefulness as chancellors of the exchequer keep the state.
It is not from the tall crowded workhouse of prosperity that men first or clearest see the eternal stars of heaven.
A happy wedlock is a long falling in love.
Great success is a great temptation.
The heresy of one age is the orthodox belief and only infallible rule of the nest.
The whole sum and substance of human history may be reduced to this maxim: that when man departs from the divine means of reaching the divine end, he suffers harm and loss.
For a thousand years no king in Christendom has shown such greatness or given so high a type of manly virtue.
Nature is God's Old Testament.
I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one... But from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.
The union of men in large masses is indispensable to the development and rapid growth of the higher faculties of men. Cities have always been the fireplaces of civilization whence light and heat radiated out into the dark cold world.
The diamond which shines in the Saviour's crown shall burn in unquenched beauty at last on the forehead of every human soul.
What a joy is there in a good book, writ by some great master of thought, who breaks into beauty as in summer the meadow into grass and dandelions and violets, with geraniums and manifold sweetness.
A democracy,- that is a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people; of course, a government of the principles of eternal justice, the unchanging law of God; for shortness' sake I will call it the idea of Freedom.
All men need something to poetize and idealize their life a little-something which they value for more than its use, and which is a symbol of their emancipation from the mere materialism and drudgery of daily life.
Disappointment is often the salt of life.
Pride is both a virtue and a vice.
The most useful is the greatest.
The great man is to be the servant of mankind, not they of him.
In all the world there is nothing so remarkable as a great man, nothing so rare, nothing which so well repays study.
Greatness is its own torment.
The coat of the buffalo never pinches under the arm, never puckers at the shoulders; it is always the same, yet never old fashioned nor out of date.
Democracy means not I am as good as you are but You are as good as I am.
Nature is man's religious book, with lessons for every day.
Never violate the sacredness of your individual self-respect. Be true to your own mind and conscience, your heart and your soul. So only can you be true to God.
Silence is a figure of speech, unanswerable, short, cold, but terribly severe.
Humanity is the sin of God.
As society advances the standard of poverty rises.
No man is so great as mankind.
The books that help you the most are those which make you think the most.
Cities have always been the fireplaces of civilization, whence light and heat radiated out into the dark.
Politics is the science of urgencies.
Wealth and want equally harden the human heart.
Remorse is the pain of sin.
Self-denial is indispensable to a strong character, and the highest kind comes from a religious stock.
The miser, starving his brother's body, starves also his own soul, and at death shall creep out of his great estate of injustice, poor and naked and miserable.
Let others laugh when you sacrifice desire to duty, if they will. You have time and eternity to rejoice in.
Outward judgment often fails, inward judgment never.
Truth never yet fell dead in the streets; it has such affinity with the soul of man, the seed however broadcast will catch somewhere and produce its hundredfold.
It is very sad for a man to make himself servant to a single thing; his manhood all taken out of him by the hydraulic pressure of excessive business.
Never violate the sacredness of your individual self-respect.